The man who was caged in a zoo | Pamela Newkirk

The long read: In 1904, Ota Benga was kidnapped from Congo and taken to the US, where he was exhibited with monkeys. His appalling story reveals the roots of a racial prejudice that still haunts us

The black clergymen who had been summoned to Harlems Mount Olivet Baptist Church for an emergency meeting on the morning of Monday 10 September 1906, arrived in a state of outrage. A day earlier, the New York Times had reported that a young African man a so-called pygmy had been put on display in the monkey house of the citys largest zoo. Under the headline Bushman Shares a Cage With Bronx Park Apes, the paper reported that crowds of up to 500 people at a time had gathered around the cage to gawk at the diminutive Ota Benga just under 5ft tall, weighing 103lb while he preoccupied himself with a pet parrot, deftly shot his bow and arrow, or wove a mat and hammock from bundles of twine placed in the cage. Children giggled and hooted with delight while adults laughed, many uneasily, at the sight.

In anticipation of larger crowds after the publicity in the New York Times, Benga was moved from a smaller chimpanzee cage to one far larger, to make him more visible to spectators. He was also joined by an orangutan called Dohang. While crowds massed to leer at him, the boyish Benga, who was said to be 23 but appeared far younger, sat silently on a stool, staring sometimes glaring through the bars.

The exhibition of a visibly shaken African with apes in the New York Zoological Gardens, four decades after the end of slavery in America, would highlight the precarious status of black people in the nations imperial city. It pitted the coloured ministers, and a few elite allies, against a wall of white indifference, as New Yorks newspapers, scientists, public officials, and ordinary citizens revelled in the spectacle. By the end of September, more than 220,000 people had visited the zoo twice as many as the same month one year earlier. Nearly all of them headed directly to the primate house to see Ota Benga.

His captivity garnered national and global headlines most of them inured to his plight. For the clergymen, the sight of one of their own housed with monkeys was startling evidence that in the eyes of their fellow Americans, their lives didnt matter.

The New York Times report about Ota Benga on 9 September, 1906. Photograph: The New York Times

On that Monday afternoon, a small group of ministers, led by the Reverend James H Gordon then hailed by the Brooklyn Eagle as one of the most eloquent Negroes in the country boarded a train to the zoological gardens, better known as the Bronx Zoo. At the gleaming white beaux-arts-style primate house, they spotted Ota Benga ambling within a cage, in the company of Dohang, the orangutan. A sign outside the cage read:

The ministers attempts to communicate with Ota Benga failed but his palpable sadness and the sign stoked their indignation. We are frank enough to say we do not like this exhibition of one of our own race with the monkeys, Gordon fumed. Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.

William Temple Hornaday, the zoos founding director and curator, defended the exhibition on the grounds of science. I am giving the exhibition purely as an ethnological exhibit, he said. The display, he insisted, was in keeping with the practice of human exhibitions of Africans in Europe, breezily evoking the continents indisputable status as the worlds paragon of culture and civilisation.

Unrepentant, Hornaday declared that the show would go on just as the sign said, each afternoon during September or until he was ordered to stop it by the Zoological Society. But Hornaday was not some rogue operator. As the nations foremost zoologist and a close acquaintance of President Theodore Roosevelt Hornaday had the full backing of two of the most influential members of the Zoological Society, both prominent figures in the citys establishment. The first, Henry Fairfield Osborn, had played a lead role in the founding of the zoo and was one of the eras most noted paleontologists. (He would later achieve fame for naming Tyrannosaurus rex.) The second, Madison Grant, was the secretary of the Zoological Society and a high-society lawyer from a prominent New York family. Grant had personally helped negotiate the arrangement to take Ota Benga.

The clergymen had no success at the zoo, and left the park vowing to take up the matter the next day with the citys mayor. But their complaint did catch the attention of the New York Times, whose editors were dismayed that anyone might protest against the display.

We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter, the paper said in an unsigned editorial. Ota Benga, according to our information, is a normal specimen of his race or tribe, with a brain as much developed as are those of its other members. Whether they are held to be illustrations of arrested development, and really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit.

The editorial said it was absurd to imagine Bengas suffering or humiliation. Pygmies, it continued, are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place of torture to him The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education of books is now far out of date.

Two years before Ota Benga arrived in New York, Daniel Brinton, a professor of linguistics and archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, had used his farewell address as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to attack claims that education and opportunity accounted for varying levels of achievement among the races. The black, the brown, and the red races differ anatomically so much from the white, especially in their splanchnic organs, that even with equal cerebral capacity they never could rival its results by equal efforts, he said.

The dominant force of these ideas embedded in science, history, government policies, and popular culture would render Bengas discomfort and humiliation in a monkey-house cage incomprehensible to the vast majority of those who witnessed it.

That it could have occurred in Americas most cosmopolitan city in the 20th century would seem enough cause for astonishment. But what appears on the surface to be a saga of one mans degradation a shameful spectacle is, on closer inspection, the story of an era, of science, of elite men and institutions, and of racial ideologies that still endure today. Worse yet, Benga left no written account of his own life and others have since filled the gap with denials, conspiratorial silence, half-truths, and even flagrant deception. But it is possible to return to the archives to letters, anthropological field notes, and contemporaneous accounts and to reconstruct the real circumstances by which Ota Benga, before the age of adulthood, was stolen from his home in central Africa and brought to New York City for the amusement, and education, of its residents.

Samuel P Verner, the self-styled African explorer who took Benga from Congo, told a New York Times reporter that neither he nor the park would profit from the exhibition. The public, he insisted, is the only beneficiary. Verner further claimed that Benga was there of his own volition: He is absolutely free The only restriction that is put upon him is to prevent him from getting away from the keepers. That is done for his own safety.

If Ota Benga is in a cage, he reasoned, he is only there to look after the animals. If there is a notice on the cage, it is only put there to avoid answering the many questions that are asked about him. Verner said that he regretted if any feelings had been hurt but his only concession was to assure the reporter, in an apparent nod to Christian sensitivities, that care would be taken not to exhibit Benga on Sundays.

Hornaday was so pleased by the attendance figures at the zoo that he quietly began making plans to keep Benga on display through the autumn, and possibly until the following spring. For his part, he told reporters that Benga had been put in the primate house because thats the most comfortable place we could find for him. In response to such claims, Reverend Gordon publicly offered to house Benga at his own orphanage for black children. But he would first have to secure Bengas release.